The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 18 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Roy Lee: Cluely generates more revenue than the latest YC batch
“We wrote our first lines of code 10 weeks ago. We're, like, earlier than the latest YC batch of companies, yet we're, like, generating probably more revenue than every single one of them, and, like, the product is, like, it's literally two and a half months si…”
Tan: Startups use AI to compress six-month product releases into days
“Like you could release something in a day or two that would have taken like six months. And if you could like multiply that out across, like the thing is like probably an org like Microsoft can't. But, like, a startup can. And every startup must.”
Horowitz says Paul Graham's Y Combinator succeeded by requiring founder-owned ideas
“And I thought Paul's genius was the ideas weren't his. And that's was the difference between an incubator and an accelerator. And that I think, you know, just proved to be the right model. And the reason it's the right model is because whoever's building the c…”
Jain: 11x was a customer for a large percentage of YC startups
“If you went to, like, the last, like, YC demo day, you probably saw ElevenX as a customer for such a large percentage of those companies.”
Silicon Valley accelerator models fail in emerging markets like Iran
“We haven't tried to copy Techstars or Y Combinator company to here, which we believe that doesn't work in, in such markets.”
Lehman: External experts and investors cannot solve a startup's hardest problems
“Whenever we had a hard problem and we went into a meeting with a lawyer or an investor or a YC partner or some kind of expert thinking, this is the meeting where someone's going to tell us like what to do. And it's so great that we have access to this. It just…”
Tan: YC advice prompt was reduced 90% in Claude before open-sourcing
“And then I actually had to go into Claude and I said, reduce this by 90%. Reduce the strength and intensity of this prompt by 90%. And then I open sourced that. Cause some of it's like, you gotta come and, you know, do YC.”
Tan: Founders should avoid following the crowd when sectors are declared dead
“And then you shouldn't follow what the crowd is saying, right? Like, at that moment, people said the web was dead, but that was sort of the perfect time to work on web and social and things like that and, you know, I didn't do it.”
Garry Tan: Existing institutions are constrained by human working memory limits
“And so the whole world, like all business, all things that people rely on, government especially is basically still built on a world that is predicated by human beings, limited human beings that can only keep seven plus or minus two things in their head.”
1990s tech incubators took 50% equity compared to Y Combinator's 7%
“The incubators in those days went for like a 50% equity split right, as contrasted to like Y Combinator, which is famously like seven percent.”
Horowitz: Y Combinator is a16z's closest spiritual analog
“I think they're probably, you know, the closest analog to us. Kind of spiritually.”
Moore: Up to 25% of recent YC startups build with AI voice
“So in recent YC cohorts, upwards of 20, 25% of companies are building with AI voice, which is really exciting.”
Coolican: Y Combinator replaces higher education's professional networking role
“You're seeing things like, you know, YC, which is incredibly valuable as a networking place. And people talk about YC as kind of like startup graduate school, right? And, you know, you're seeing places like that have Add an incredible amount of value providing…”
Tan: Y Combinator funded Clawvisor, which built an agent-only bug reporting API
“There's a, API company that we funded called Clawvisor, and they released a bug report endpoint that is not for humans to use. It's for agents who use their software to use”
Zapier had 1,000 paying beta users when Y Combinator finally accepted them
“This time around, I think the time we applied, we'd had a thousand people that had paid for access to the beta, 10,000 people on a launch list.”
Y Combinator rejected Zapier's first application in 2011
“So we go ahead and apply. Straight rejected.”
Masad: YC startup Fig built its initial product entirely on Replit
“FIG is this command line autocomplete tool that this YC startup, I think it was like YC-twenty or something like that, or YC-twenty-one. And it's used by tens of thousands of engineers And then the original product was entirely built on, on Replit.”
Brett Hagler: New Story funded 100 homes in 91 days during YC
“We have funded now a 131 homes. During YC, we did this campaign we said, let's pick a crazy goal during YC, and so we said, we're going to try to fund a hundred homes in a hundred days, and, you know, we launched this campaign, and we got fortunate, and we did…”